1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to full-duplex communications and more specifically to modifications to the Media Access Control sub-layer of communication node protocols in full-duplex mode, where the modifications coordinate communicating simultaneous data and simultaneous acknowledgements between two or more communication nodes while further coordinating time periods between requests, responses, data, acknowledgments, and subsequent communication cycles.
2. Introduction
All network-capable computing devices have unique identifiers assigned to them at manufacture, enabling communications with other network-capable computing devices. These unique identifiers are called Media Access Control addresses and serve to identify the computing device when communicating with other computing devices, either wirelessly or via a wired connection. With wired connections, transmit and receive signals are kept separate by using separate pins or physical wires for transmitting and receiving communications. However, when the computing device communicates wirelessly, specific protocols ensure that both the transmitting device and the receiving device are effectively engaged. These protocols rely upon the Media Access Control addresses of individual computing devices while affecting the Media Access Control sub-layer of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model. Because these protocols effectively control all incoming and outgoing communications, the protocols for managing communications are themselves simply referred to as the MAC.
Previous versions of the MAC work effectively with half-duplex communications, where a first communication node and a second communication node communicate one at a time in a single frequency channel. However, these previous MAC versions were not designed for full-duplex communications, where both the first communication node and the second communication node are transmitting and receiving on a single channel simultaneously.